My Writerly Blog

Every writer, at least every writer I know, has at some point expressed a desire for a sugar daddy. Or mama, whatever. Those first scenes in Breakfast at Tiffany’s , where he has that great apartment, cash on the table, and time to do nothing but write and steal dime-store masks are enough to make us drool with insatiable need. And at the end when he throws it all away (for love no less! The fool.), all we can think is what an idiot he was to give up such a good racket. Dignity be damned, we’d rather write than spend the rest of our lives finding stiletto heels in the fridge. I’m Paul Varjak. I’m not kept, not really. I’m just married. We had a wedding, and then my darn husband went off and found a wonderful job in BFE Wales. Those villages in the quaint English movies with Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, where they’re always walking everywhere, and everyone is excited for the mail…they’re all true. The mail is exciting because there’s no other way to purchase specialty items. Last week I ...

I recently completed (for now, of course), my novel The Pathfinder , and I have been embroiled in the grueling process of finding an agent to represent me, and failing that, a publisher willing to take it on. If you're a writer, you know this is the worst part of being a writer. Now, I'm not talking your backyard, "Yeah, I took a class and wrote a story and it was mostly about me at five years old when I was clinically depressed and my uncle and/or aunt was overly fond of me" sort of writer. I'm talking about those of us who have an inborn compulsion to be published, self-sufficient authors, if not world-famous and vomitously wealthy, and who also therefore have a compulsion to have the powerful people in the publishing industry spit in our faces. Repeatedly. You spend a week copiously poring over the Writer's Digest, picking out the agencies that accept work from new writers, from unpublished writers, who have even a remote fondness for your particular genre....